The Misclassification of Autistic Writing as AI-Generated
Primary research
#421
- Canonical URL
- http://arxiv.org/abs/2607.14729v1
- Topic
- Academic Integrity
- First seen
- 2026-07-17 07:16:08
- Last seen
- 2026-07-17 07:16:08
Source raw items (1)
- arXiv2026-07-17 07:15:06The Misclassification of Autistic Writing as AI-Generated
Recent findings suggest that detection models for artificial intelligence (AI) cannot accurately identify AI-generated text and may exhibit bias against certain minority groups. In the present study, anecdotal claims that autistic writers more often have their work flagged as AI-generated are examined empirically. A corpus of approximately 60,000 Reddit posts split into "likely-autistic" and "general-Reddit" subcorpora is used to compare the distribution of probabilities output by the OpenAI GPT-2 detection model. Differences in textual features between subcorpora are observed and compared to reported features of AI-generated text. Results showed that while less than two-percent of either subcorpus was flagged as AI-generated by the model, significantly more texts from the likely-autistic subcorpus were flagged. Connections between features of text with likely-autistic authors and AI-generated text were not straightforward. The widespread use of AI-detection models with a potential bias against autistic writers in their output prompts ethical scrutiny, and the authors recommend further critical examination of the models themselves as well as their use in academic contexts.